


The Great Haus Bake-Off

by Goonlalagoon



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, I actually cannot remember if Jack's love of maple syrup is canon or fanon at this point, I have no memory of what prompted me to write this but here we are, Or at least his insistence on using Proper maple syrup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-02 05:45:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18804931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: No-one was quite certain, later, who started it.It had been a post-practice brunch, they all agreed, sometime in that period when everyone on the Internet - or at least, about thirty percent of the parts of the Internet that Bitty frequented and re-tweeted things from - was obsessed with Great British Bake Off, and someone had eventually said “It’s baking, it isn’t like it’s exciting”, and it seemed like almost everyone in the room made a sound of thoughtless agreement.Then came the terrible ‘clang’ of an oven door being closed.Instantly, the room fell silent. The look Eric Bittle turned on them all would freeze enough water for an ice rink, and for a long moment everyone at the Haus kitchen table was both trying to remember whether they had said the terrible thing, and wondering with deep seated horror whether if no-one owned up Bitty would actually withhold all baked goods.Chowder actually gulped when he began to smirk.“Oh, really? Y’all better be ready to put your money where your mouths are.”





	The Great Haus Bake-Off

No-one was quite certain, later, who started it.

 It had been a post-practice brunch, they all agreed, sometime in that period when everyone on the Internet - or at least, about thirty percent of the parts of the Internet that Bitty frequented and re-tweeted things from - was obsessed with Great British Bake Off, and someone had eventually said “It’s _baking_ , it isn’t like it’s _exciting_ ”, and it seemed like almost everyone in the room made a sound of thoughtless agreement. 

Then came the terrible ‘clang’ of an oven door being closed.

 Instantly, the room fell silent. The look Eric Bittle turned on them all would freeze enough water for an ice rink, and for a long moment everyone at the Haus kitchen table was both trying to remember whether _they_ had said the terrible thing, and wondering with deep seated horror whether if no-one owned up Bitty would actually withhold all baked goods.

 Chowder actually gulped when he began to smirk.

 “Oh, _really?_ Y’all better be ready to put your money where your mouths are.”

* * *

It’s really only supposed to be a small thing. Bitty plans to just get the boys to try and make something - maybe a pie, or maybe he’d give them something fancier, patisserie of some kind - which they would all inevitably fail at but would probably make fools of themselves in some deeply entertaining fashion while baking. But Lardo listens to him patter on about it for fifteen minutes, swallows her pie, and grins.

“Say, Bits? You reckon we could turn this into a Samwell Men’s Hockey publicity thing?”

 They even manage to get a sort-of sponsorship out of it by dint of Lardo sidling up to the manager of the cute little store Bitty goes to for baking apparatus - he’ll compromise on many things for the sake of budgeting, but when he needs another pie dish or his scales go on the blink, Eric Bittle is not afraid to _invest -_ and cheerfully explaining the entire story. The manager is delighted and insists on being a judge in exchange for giving them a deal on some of the key equipment, because Bitty loves his teammates to pieces but wouldn’t dream of letting them near his mama’s set of cake tins for love nor money. 

When the delivery arrives he discovers that the manger has even managed to get them cake stands patterned with skating boots and little snowflakes. 

One of Lardo’s arty friends agrees to film it in exchange for permission to submit it as part of his film and media portfolio, and Bitty indulges himself in a full rerun of every episode of Bake Off aired so far to gather ideas. 

Lardo joins him for most of it, already planning the spiel she’s going to stick up on the SMH website to cover the event and organising a few people for taste testing (with a guarantee of a Bittle produced rendition of the days challenge in case all other offerings are truly inedible as they both half suspect they will be)

 Meanwhile, the rest of the boys begin to panic. Baking is not a skill that was widely associated with the SMH Haus before the arrival of Bitty, and their main interaction with baked goods is still firmly on the consumer end of things.

Ransom is seen carrying a stack of cookbooks up to his chin across campus from the library, and spends his evenings memorising recipes with the fervour he usually saves for last minute test revision. No-one quite dares use the Haus kitchen to practice, because _what if they damage Bitty_ _’s baking stuff he will either cry or kill them or both_ , and take over miscellaneous dorm kitchens to try and memorise the basic sponge recipe. A bemused Farmer lets Chowder use her kitchen, and promptly tracks down Bitty to ask what on earth is going on, because “he accidentally used salt instead of sugar and I know for a fact he’s done that several times before, why is he trying to bake again now??” 

(She joins in with the GBBO re-watch and makes some _excellent_ suggestions for possible challenges.) 

Shitty attempts to make macarons, because he suspects that Bitty is going to make them all _suffer_. He pokes his failed attempt and concludes that Bitty may be prepared to make them all suffer, but he also loves baking too much to inflict this level of horror on _himself_ , surely? 

He largely stops trying to prepare himself and instead starts waxing lyrical about baking in the context of gender roles, mostly the hypocrisy that being able to bake a cake is still considered an essential life skill for a girl, but no one has ever thought it unreasonable that _he_ has never baked a cake before in his life, and winds up on Wikipedia at three fifteen A.M. having gone down a Google rabbit hole that has somehow led to him reading the page about the societal structure of meerkats.

 In the end, Bitty decides on three challenges, as a nod to the format and a fun way to get some variety; cookie decoration (he’ll provide the prepped dough, bake ‘em once everyone’s used whatever cookie cutters they want, and then they do the decoration), mini-cake construction (everyone gets a batch of miniature sponges, their choice of how to glue the two layers together and add finishing touches), and one actual baking round - the _showstopper pie._

Lardo makes a schedule, because the Haus kitchen won’t take all seven of the team who got themselves into this mess trying to work in it all at once, so that they rotate between stages and go in batches to Murder Shop ‘n Stop to buy their pie filling ingredients.

 It’s a _disaster,_ and Bitty watches the chaos unfold with entirely unconcealed glee, keeping up a cheerful voice over - and if his chirps happen to distract the boys and lead to much panicked responses and second guessing, _well_ , that’ s just the nature of baking in a high-pressure environment, isn’t it?

* * *

The first round of judging involves a lot of guesswork. Admittedly, Chowder’s blue and white creations are a lot easier to figure out if you’ve seen the inside of the boy’s room and could reliably guess what he was going to attempt, so there are a lot of puzzled looks exchanged amongst the judges until someone makes the link with the Sharks hoodie he’s wearing. 

It turns out that Dex can do a pretty neat galaxy icing pattern if he puts his mind to it, even if he got the consistency wrong; Bitty may actually have to try it himself, sometime.

(”Jack, did you…did you actually do maple leaf cut outs with a maple glaze? That’s…”

“Gotta stay on brand, eh? And I was told I wasn’t allowed to do plain circles and decorate them as hockey pucks.”

* * *

Most of the minature sponge cakes are gradually sliding more and more lopsided as the various attempts at butter-cream or other fillings prove unable to hold. Holster has somehow managed to cut his at almost a perfect diagonal instead of in half; Nursey simply gave up and presents his as an ‘open sandwich’ rather than trying to glue the layers back together.

 (“Shits, what did you even _put_ in the middle of - is this _marmite?_ Did you - did you seriously - _why?_ _”_

“Listen, love it or hate it, and I happen to love it. Sweet and savoury, a classic combination -”

“ _Marmite victoria sponge_ is not a classic combination, Shitty.”

“I was told to be _creative_ , thank you very much, unlike those of us who went with _jam and butter-cream_.”

“I like jam and butter-cream. Anyway, I did use _apple_ jam, that’s not typical. And I put maple syrup in the -”

“Bro, I am also from Canada, and even I will say that is _incredibly Canadian of you_.”)

* * *

Bitty almost weeps when he sees the final range of pies produced. He was braced for them to be terrible; he just wasn’t quite prepared enough. For a moment, he wonders if this whole stunt was really worth it.

 Fillings are burnt while pastry is undercooked to the point of being raw - or the filling is horribly flavoured and the pastry overcooked until it’s about the consistency of wood chips. 

Ransom has managed a surprisingly pretty lattice over three-quarters of his pie, but ran out of pastry for the last section. Chowder forgot to leave air-holes in the lid of his (and put salt instead of sugar in the filling). 

Nursey isn’t sure what ingredient he forgot, but it was clearly one of the essential ones. 

But there is one pie that actually looks…if not something that Bitty would have baked _himself_ , at least something he wouldn’t be instantly offended to be connected to. The lid is a near perfect golden brown, with precisely spaced snips to let the steam waft gently out. The pastry is precisely crimped around the edge of the pie dish, with the excess trimmed away to leave a clean margin. The filling is sweet but not sickly.

 The decorative pastry maple leaves add a certain _artistry_ , the main judge declares with the pleased smile of someone who knows they were created with a cookie cutter bought from his own shop.

* * *

The video of Jack being presented with an ice-skate patterned cake tin and a matching apron as he’s declared the ‘Samwell Hockey Haus Bake-Off Champion gets re-tweeted by Bob Zimmerman within five minutes of being posted, to a flurry of Twitter activity. 

Lardo and Bitty were definitely not expecting their slightly-spite-motivated publicity stunt to go _quite_ this public.

 (It was a really good pie, though.)


End file.
